we are told that we need to become hard, that in order to become better competitors we need to harden ourselves to withstand the suffering that we are to endure over the challenges of the distance. we are taught that we must become hard, so as to survive against the afflictions of brutal events under tough conditions involving  unforgiving circumstances with vicious people all around us. we are tutored that we have to be hard because life itself is hard.

we take it as a given and assume it as a universal, and so apply it to mean that we harden our bodies and harden our minds and harden our spirits in the expectation that we harden ourselves to everything and every body and anything and any body.

but we never stop to question if this is all true.

admittedly, it's a survival mechanism, and one that is highly instinctive. and it has its own perverse logic: we are our lives, so our lives are us, and if our lives are hard then we are hard.

the problem is that life isn't always hard. life happens the way life happens. life is what it is. life just is. it's not always what we like, not always what we want, not always what we expect. because life, being constituted by a universe beyond our reach and outside our understanding, is most assuredly not within our control. and by treating all of life the same we ignore all the splendors being shared with us from the cosmos.

the problem is that even when we do encounter the brutal and the tough and the unforgiving and the vicious, the appropriate response isn't always to return the same in kind. becoming hard means becoming insensitive. impassive. cold. even cruel. which is not how we were born, not how we were made, and not what we were meant to be. and so by becoming hard we deny what we are--we deny our humanity.

more than that, it only perpetuates the suffering we face. not just us, but everyone around us. even the ones who've been anything but hard towards us. even the ones to whom we know we ought to offer love.

the problem ultimately is that we take it as a shield to hide behind, turning to it with each problem, building it with each torment, believing it to be the answer to our torture. and we never realize all the while that as the shield grows its weight grows, to the point that it can become crushing.

nor do we realize that since the shield is of our own design, it doesn't actually work to change anything about us and instead only covers up what we are, meaning that there will come a day when we encounter something that resonates in just the right way to reach deep within us to the essence of our nature so as to crack, then break, then shatter the shield of our own making, causing our world to come cascading down to crash around us. and the result, for many, can be devastating.

in short, becoming hard means becoming brittle. when what we really want is to become resilient.

and to do this, we have to know what we are, so that we can understand why we hurt and recognize why we fail, and from there begin to know how we can respond to challenges in ways that allow us to recover so that we can recommence our race and thereby come to succeed through our journey of the distance. not to deny our humanity, but to accept it. not to control life, but to live it.

in other words, we don't want hard. what we really want is wisdom.

because creation is about more than competition, it's about living. and in living, we want do more than just survive. we also want to flourish.

Posted by jonathan starlight at 5:32 PM No comments: aging athletes (part 1) it's a reality all of us face, as much as we don't like to hear it: we're getting older.  inexorably, inevitably, invariably older.  regardless of what we do or think or want, it's a part of what we are as creatures of biology.  and like all biology, we live with the fundamental truth of our own mortality, as sure as we are locked within our linear existence in time.

given this, we are left with an understanding that there is a beginning and an end, and by implication the interval in between. within this interval we live our lives, following an arc of aging and a path of maturization that leads us through the turns of experience which become our ways of wisdom.  it's not always pretty, it's certainly not easy, and it's never simple.

it's a reflection of who and what and why and where and when we are. of our decisions and our mistakes. of things that worked and things that didn't. of things we did and things we didn't. all ultimately choices we made given our circumstances based on what we knew drawn upon what we had using what we were.

but this tells us another fundamental truth.

our lives are what we make of them. they aren't inexorable, inevitable, or invariable. if anything, they are constituted in a crazy haphazard mishmashed agglomeration of confusion and chaos. in other words: they are not linear.

so even as time is beyond our control, our lives our not; even as the beginning and the end is beyond our control, the interval in between is not.

which leaves us with the question of what we choose to do in response: do we live the life given to us? or do we die within our time?

the difference is that the former accords some respect to the thing called life; the latter desecrates it.

the former sees the phenomenon that is the appearance of something coming from nothing, and recognizes the mystery that is existence arising from the emptiness of the abyss, and accepts the wonder that is creation alighting the darkness of infinite. and in so doing, it comes to know it as grandeur. glory. majesty.

the latter misses it. ignores it. denies it. and in so doing, blinds itself from the profound and lobotomizes itself of the great.

the difference is that the former endows life with value; the latter wastes it.

Posted by jonathan starlight at 10:55 AM No comments: Saturday, September 08, 2012

a different kind of coach, Swedish style

i'm breaking away from endurance sports for this post to comment on something that i think is relevant for sports in general. there was a news item last recently that sort of got lost in the media, but which was a relatively major event for anyone following soccer (futbol) or women's sports. Pia Sundhage, the coach of the US national women's team, left after 5 years to coach for Sweden.

you can't blame her. she's done just about everything any coach could have wanted to do for the US women's soccer: she turned around a program that was in disarray and mired in infighting following the debacle of the 2007 World Cup, changed a national style of play away from sheer physicality to meet a world whose quality in skill and fitness had become much more competitive, led the US to the World Cup finals in 2011 in a series of games for the ages, and brought the US to 2 gold medals despite a series of challenges that would have shaken most national teams. she now gets to be the national team coach of her home country, a dream job for any athlete.

it made bigger news in Sweden:
for those of you who don't know Swedish, she's essentially discussing her return to Sweden and the Swedish national team.  this is a big deal for Swedish soccer, since Pia Sundhage is a national hero and her coaching record is rife with success.  she's expected to do the same thing she's done in her previous coaching stints: raise teams which have been seen as underperforming.

the reason i'm bringing this up here is because of some things that have been said in Pia's praise in the wake of her return to Sweden. a good example was this piece from Julie Foudy on ESPNW (i've also posted the text of it at the end of this post):
to me, this raises some important points regarding coaching. Pia is proof that you don't have to be a raving, screaming, frothing, gesticulating maniac to be a good coach. it's possible to train, educate, and lead players with a completely different approach involving techniques that might seem different, quirky, or even bizarre. i think there's a number of things the rest of sports can learn from this:
i want to note that much of this is something i consider typical of Scandinavian society. i'm not going to say that all Scandinavians are like this, or like Pia (trust me, they're not, she is rather...unusual), but many of these qualities are ones that i remember as a child being constantly stressed as desirable and appropriate characteristics in society. and i see them being reinforced in archetypes labeled as "good" by people and media every time i return to Sweden. perhaps this leads to a culture that the rest of the world deems weird or quirky. but if you look at Pia, you can see the results that it generates, and i don't think anyone would turn that down.

on a final note, i'm not going to say that everyone go out and mimic Pia and play a guitar and sing songs for the team. i will say, however, that this is another area that shows just how good a coach Pia is. she managed to get her players to buy in, even while doing things that i think most athletes, particularly American athletes, jaded and cynical as they are, would find cheesy, corny, even silly.

again, this shows that there are skills involved in coaching that most people don't understand, and that too often we turn to the stereotype of a screaming red-faced lunatic because we're lazy, ignorant, don't know any better, or don't know we deserve better. as a result, it's just too easy to engage in destructive coaching. i think that Pia's tenure as a US coach is a reminder that it's worthwhile to develop the skills of positive coaching, and not just for the national pride, or the team, or the players, but also society.

Pia's Calm Through the Storms Redefined the US Team
September 4, 2012
Julie Foudy

To better understand Pia Sundhage's five years with the U.S. women's soccer team, let's rewind to 2007 and revisit the state of the program at that time.

The U.S. team had been blown out of the 2007 Women's World Cup semifinals in a 4-0 loss against Marta and Brazil. Hope Solo, who was curiously benched for that game, had just been kicked off the team for blasting her coach, Greg Ryan, and U.S. goalkeeper Briana Scurry after the loss.

The team was playing unattractive soccer and the program seemed to be on a sharp decline only three years after it had won gold at the 2004 Athens Olympics. The team was in chaos; there is no other way to put it.

Cue the music...and the singing...

... in walks Pia Sundhage, with her guitar in hand, who busts out Bob Dylan's "The Times They Are a Changin'" tune for the team (no joke ... you cannot make this stuff up). Pia, a former Swedish star player known for her free spirit and tendency to break into song, was hired to coach the U.S. women's team at a time when things surely need some changin'.

When Pia came to the team in November 2007, she either didn't notice the mess or, more appropriately, didn't care. In typical Pia fashion, she brought life back to a team that desperately needed laughter. She was the perfect hire because she didn't just preach enjoy the game, she lived it. And through her joy, players found oxygen.

If you look at her record alone during her tenure as head coach -- two Olympic gold medals, one Women's World Cup final appearance and only six losses overall -- you would be incredibly impressed. But that doesn't tell the whole story; it doesn't even tell the most impressive part of the story. In my opinion, these actually were Pia's defining moments:

• Her first task was to bring Solo back into the family. No easy task given the history of this team and what had transpired. But Pia asked the team to move on and said it needed Solo as a goalkeeper to win, and the team bought in. Whether or not you like Hope's vocal style, you can't say she hasn't been an effective, world-class goalkeeper over these past five years under Pia's direction.

Posted by jonathan starlight at 9:21 AM No comments: eating dilemmas: fat, low-fat, or no-fat

well, here's another post to add to the fat debate.

i came across this minor news item that i thought was worthwhile to bring up, since it echoes a lot of things that i've come to believe in recent years:
in brief, the article brings up something that recent nutritional guidelines and medical science have started to argue: fat is not necessarily bad, and it's a mistake to eliminate it from your diet. in fact, the fat-free options for food in some ways are even worse, since they deny your body the ability to absorb nutrients and adjust your biochemistry in ways that harm your metabolic rate and sense of appetite.

i used to believe that fat was generally just bad. like so many other athletes, i had coaches who drummed into me the line that fat--either on me or, under the "you are what you eat" mantra, in my food--was the root of all evil and the scourge of all that was good and noble and right and just in this world. as a result, my nutrition plan often involved an obsessive witch hunt to eradicate all fat from my diet and, by extension, from me.

except that it didn't. if anything, it seemed to make the fat on me more stubborn. worse, it affected how i felt, emotionally and physically, with irritability, despondency, sluggishness, and sometimes outright weakness being chronic states. the result in my performance was decidedly negative.

in recent, years, i've come around to believe that fat has a crucial role to play in our body biochemistry, and that it's unwise and perhaps even dangerous to treat it as categorical anathema. it serves a function in regulating the chemical reactions in the body, and so impacts our metabolism and hormones, and thus influences mental and physical health.

the issue, however, is that there are problems with too much fat just as much as there is with too little fat, and problems with good fats and bad fats. i'll refer to this sample of useful links:
i think the key here is the ancient Greek belief in moderation. we need fat, but in appropriate quantities, and of a type that helps our body's metabolism and hormones operate in ways conducive to mental and physical well-being. which means that we need to break away from a simplistic view of fat as categorically bad, but instead as a more nuanced view of it as a nutrient that has to be understood and consumed in proper amounts and proper form to be useful.

probably not what people who lead busy lives want to hear--more study, more attention, more care. but i can tell you from my own experience that it has made it easier for me to control my body fat, and i've been feeling a lot better. while i certainly won't attribute everything to a change in how i deal with fat, i still think it is a relevant factor. one thing's for sure: ice cream sure tastes better.
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